The House Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee’s next chairman, Lee Terry, R-Neb., said he plans to continue its focus on data security and privacy issues in the coming session of Congress. Terry told us the lack of consumer privacy protections on the Web is a “legitimate issue,” and he plans to hold briefings to discuss the role of Google and other Internet companies in the debate. Having made a name for himself as a strong opponent of FCC net neutrality rules, an advocate for the agency’s reform and supporter of spectrum reallocation, Terry will take over the subcommittee in January.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski unveiled an agreement with the four major national carriers to “accelerate” their ability to transmit emergency text messages to 911 call centers. The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) also signed the agreement. Industry and government officials conceded Friday much remains to be done to make widespread text-to-911 a reality.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- The 4K hard-disk server that Sony is including with its $25,000 84-inch XBR84X900 LED-lit 4K TV is “highly secure,” Mitch Singer, Sony Pictures Entertainment chief digital strategy officer, told the Content Protection Summit. The 4K Ultra HD video player will store 10 feature films from Sony Pictures and also come preloaded with 4K video shorts, Sony had said. The film industry will keep developing higher content protection standards, Singer and other studio executives told the summit.

A group of CLECs criticized AT&T’s petition for the FCC to consider eliminating various legacy rules, arguing it’s meant to “distract” the commission from its true policy challenge: updating the agency’s competition policies to ensure that competitors can obtain ILEC last-mile facilities and interconnection on reasonable rates, terms and conditions. An AT&T executive told us the company’s petition was meant to open a dialogue.

Dish Network is getting a vote on its eagerly awaited waiver order at the next FCC meeting, but it may not include the company’s new proposal, said a commission official and industry analyst. The DBS company last week asked the FCC to back off a proposal in the draft order circulating since around Thanksgiving and not limit the power levels of the all-terrestrial wireless network it wants to build out in the entire uplink band (CD Dec 5 p8). Chairman Julius Genachowski and Wireless Bureau staff don’t seem inclined to change the draft to include that proposal, an agency official told us and an industry analyst wrote clients Thursday. Dish wants to instead not use the lowest 5 MHz of its 2000 to 2020 MHz uplink at all, allowing those 5 MHz to serve as a guard band to the H block that a commission rulemaking notice proposes to auction.

T-Mobile USA will begin offering Apple products on its network in 2013, Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann said Thursday at a webcast conference in Germany. T-Mobile CEO John Legere implied in a separate presentation during the conference that the products T-Mobile offers will include the iPhone, but did not say what other devices it might make available. “When we do announce what we're going to deploy, it will clearly be better and more effective” than recent media reports have suggested, he said. A T-Mobile spokesman said additional information on T-Mobile’s Apple offerings would be available later. An Apple spokesman confirmed that T-Mobile would begin carrying the company’s products next year, but declined to discuss specific models.

If a federal appeals court upholds the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality order, the commission could feel empowered to further expand its regulatory reach, Commissioner Ajit Pai said at a Phoenix Center Symposium Thursday. Pai told us afterwards that he has not had a chance to read Tuesday’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upholding the FCC’s data roaming rules (CD Dec 5 p1). The same court will also hear the net neutrality challenge filed by Verizon and MetroPCS.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- UltraViolet is “going well” for the film industry despite Disney’s lack of support for the digital rights system, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd told us at the Content Protection Summit Thursday. Disney is the only major studio that doesn’t yet support UltraViolet, going instead with its own Keychest technology, but Dodd said it’s still possible Disney could end up backing UltraViolet. Dodd is “optimistic” that the new Copyright Alert System (CAS) framework supported by MPAA, RIAA and major Internet service providers will help reduce copyright infringement, he told the summit.

The advent of next-generation 911 will create both jurisdictional and funding challenges, government officials and stakeholders said. The pending changes call for new coordination. When Tennessee first created a statewide 911 board in the late 1990s, most local 911 centers “thought it was a terrible idea,” said Lynn Questell, the board’s executive director, speaking Thursday at the National Conference of State Legislatures meeting in Washington. But the presence of a board allowed coordination and implementation of E911 technologies in better and faster ways, she said, saying seven U.S. states still lack 911 boards and showing maps that revealed a dearth of 911 advances in those states.

Makers of consumer electronics and sellers of pay TV expanded a multi-year power reduction effort begun a year ago (CD Nov 21 p6) to include the country’s DBS providers and three largest telcos. Those five companies agreed to join the existing six top U.S. cable operators that had been deploying set-top boxes capable of partly shutting down when not in use. The 11 multichannel video programming distributors now will work with four CE companies on such light-sleep devices.